Another well written articles (not like mine 😀)
just the right information to make you think before committing yourself or your business.
Few points I would add and a funny true story. Yes I know, here we go the old git is at it once again.
For me Cloud services are 2 folds.
1) You move your servers to the cloud for scalability, up time and you hope cost.
Basically, your old in premises servers will become a VMs from various offering and will be linked to 'your office' via VPN link(s).
I do have few clients working this way.
2) you replace your servers by 'cloud services'. Basically your servers are gone to oblivion.
As an example with M$, Entra will replace AD, o365 will replace your exchange servers, Sharepoint will replace your file server, etc...
Filesharing replacement might not be easy for everything. Some Applications still want 'Drive letters' to operate properly, therefore a service like 'Egnyte' might be needed.
Database... Migration might not be possible or will long take time, therefore the only solution is an online SQL server.
Bottom line the above migration needs planning and time to complete. Therefore there will be an overhead regarding cost.
On course, the elephant in the room is 'Internet connection'
No internet, no servers, no services, basically nothing. No work is possible.
If you do have 'servers' within your premises, you might be able to do some but very limited work.
Basically, you need at the minimum
Main Internet connection.
Secondary Internet connection.
then if both are done, what is emergency plan in place!
anyway here the funny story.
Many, many years ago one of my client migrated to o365 when it came out. They had a very old server and it was the best (?) path forward for them.
I was on site one day since their internet was down. We talking the day of ISDN, DSL 2M up/down and ADSL)
Anyway while sorting their issue one of the staff was asking me the following.
He could understand internet was down and he could not browse the web but when he was trying to send an email to his colleague sitting in front of him he was not receiving the email. Before this was working fine.
I explained him the why (o365... online... blah blah blah)
I could see their mouths opening wide. One replied no one told us this would be the case that if Internet is down we have no email.
I told them since the emails are alll online I would assume you were aware about it, this is why no one really explained you the risk. They assumed you knew.
I was a shock of the system for them.
The so call perfect solution, was not that perfect after all.
